We should cut our ties with school uniform

School uniforms are an infringement on a child's human rights, says Bryony
Gordon.

One of the reasons that my parents chose my secondary school – the other being that it was the only one I was actually accepted into – was its policy on uniform. Put simply, it did not have one. As we toured its grand halls and not so grand classrooms, Mrs Holyoak, the headmistress, explained that she hated the thought of having to see corridors full of girls in drab, grey uniforms day after day after day.

She wanted to create individuals, she said. She wanted us to be creative. And so we were, though never too creative. If a skirt crept above the knee or a top revealed too much cleavage, we were marched to the cupboard of doom and placed in the kind of skirt that Mary Poppins would wear, a jumper that Susan Boyle would be proud of, and shoes that had last been seen on the feet of a clown.

Such a prospect ensured that we rarely strayed from the path of sensible clothing. The same cannot be said of Wilmington Enterprise College in Dartford, Kent, where 380 of the school's 820 pupils were recently punished for flouting rules on uniform. In just one day. A whopping 46 of them were actually sent home to change their clothes. Belinda Langley-Bliss, the acting head of the college, insisted: "We advised students before the end of term and posted letters to parents about what we expected. On the first day back there were reminders."

One mother, whose two daughters were shown the door for wearing incorrect footwear, said that this sartorial crackdown "just seems ridiculous. If it was an adult, it would be classed as an infringement on their human rights."

Ho ho! Human rights indeed. I am sure the kids were left traumatised by the experience of being told off for doing something they shouldn't have. Sue the school, I say. Sue them for enforcing rules. How dare they? Who does this Langley-Bliss character think she is? A headmistress or something?

Actually – joking aside – I think this mother has a point, although I am not sure it is quite the one she meant to make. School uniforms are an infringement on a child's human rights. They are hideous, scratchy, expensive, and sometimes they are bottle green (one colleague will never again be able to wear red and navy blue, thanks to her uniform). And they should have gone the way of the cane.

I am sure that many readers will disagree, insisting on the positive effects of uniform on discipline, such as the fact that it prevents the cooler kids from bullying the nerdier ones for not having the latest trainers. But bullies will find a way, uniform or no uniform. The natural order of the playground will assert itself regardless. Meanwhile, a study published in the Journal of Education Research just over a decade ago found that wearing a uniform had little effect on behaviour, attendance or academic achievement.

Stick a kid in a school uniform, and the first thing that they will do is attempt to clamber out of it. Failing that, they will try to alter it in some way, so as to mark out their individuality. They will hitch up their skirt, scribble on their shirt or cut up their blazer.

If you think about it, the school uniform actually encourages ill-discipline. The only people who enjoy wearing it are perverts and drunken women on hen nights who will eventually be found with their old netball skirt round their waist and their shirt covered in vomit.

Uniforms look good on some people – sailors, soldiers, doctors, nurses, the Village People, the police (as long as they remember to stick on their identity numbers). But not on schoolchildren. They make them look drab and depressed and remind them that they belong to a place they would really rather not be.

In Italy, they avoid these outfits like the plague because they literally seem a bit fascist – harking back to an era when kids were stuck in youth movements and forced to wear uniforms even when they weren't at school.

Anyway, don't take my word for it: listen, instead, to the headmaster of Fortismere school in Haringey, one of the most successful comprehensives in the country. Aydin Onac tells me that he is "proud" to be in charge of a non-uniform school.

"Our students are encouraged to dress sensibly and to take responsibility for their appearance," he says. "Uniform means 'the same'. That's the antithesis of what education should be."